How Medical Faculty and Students Are Using AI Today

Two-thirds of U.S. doctors see the benefits of using artificial intelligence (AI) in their work, according to a survey conducted last year by the American Medical Association. But only about one-third said they were already using it at the time. Some of that gulf comes down to training. Medical schools — like many industries — are grappling with the opportunities and challenges AI offers, to teach future doctors how the technology may help them. 

Tufts University School of Medicine adopted an AI-focused learning objective in the fall of 2024. This spring, a group of faculty members and students at the School of Medicine, led by Maria Blanco, professor of psychiatry and associate dean for faculty development, published a paper exploring use and attitudes toward the technology among the school’s faculty and students based off of a needs-assessment survey the team distributed. 

Blanco and her coauthors knew that students had begun experimenting with AI on their own and wanted to understand how they were using the tool and how that could be improved. The result helped the team outline a roadmap for better integrating AI into the school’s curriculum. 

“This technology has the potential to change the way medicine is practiced, and even to change how students learn, so we cannot disregard it,” she says. 

To conduct the survey, Blanco and her coauthors reached out to all medical students and a select group of faculty. They heard back from 128 faculty members and 138 medical students, with student respondents evenly distributed across academic years. They found that many respondents were already using AI, but few felt incredibly comfortable or familiar with the technology. Only 12% of students and 9% of faculty said they were proficient with the tool. 

Use Cases and Ethics

Faculty at the medical school currently use artificial intelligence most often in their clinical practice, the survey showed, such as for taking notes or helping analyze patient charts. They also use the technology in their research and to enhance their classroom teaching. AI can help develop curriculum tools like test writing, as long as a faculty member checks the accuracy of outputs. 

Students appear to use the tech most often to deepen their understanding of course material, through interactive learning or summarizing content. 

Encouragingly, both the surveyed faculty and students showed concern about the ethical implications of integrating artificial intelligence into their work and requested training on how to utilize AI in an ethical manner. Last spring, Blanco said, the School of Medicine’s AI & Biotech Medicine Club sponsored their own forum and invited faculty members to discuss the ethics of AI. 

Blanco hopes that awareness around ethical considerations will extend towards a broader recognition of the limitations of artificial intelligence. The technology’s powerful capabilities, she says, can make it easy to believe in its infallibility; but outputs can still include biases, inaccuracies, and hallucinations. When integrating AI into the School of Medicine curriculum, she wants to ensure that students learn how to treat AI-based content and analysis with appropriate skepticism and appraisal, training students in the critical thinking skills they need to discern fact from fiction. 

“These technologies simulate knowledge generation and clinical reasoning with a human-like fluency — this can be deceiving,” she says. “We have to make sure that we train everyone to know how to use it, because it has assets, but it also has significant pitfalls and risks.”